When Ivo Perelman Led A Jazz Quartet

Notes on three albums with Matthew Shipp, Michael Bisio and Whit Dickey

Today is Bandcamp Friday, the day on which Bandcamp forgoes its usual cut of sales, passing all money directly to artists and labels. This makes it a perfect time to pre-order Quartet (England) 1985, the Anthony Braxton live set coming out on Burning Ambulance Music on Braxton’s 80th birthday, June 4.

The set includes four complete concerts by the Braxton quartet (featuring 2025 NEA Jazz Master Marilyn Crispell on piano, Mark Dresser on bass, and Gerry Hemingway on percussion) and recordings of them playing various standards at soundchecks, as well as new liner notes by Graham Lock (author of Forces In Motion, a brilliant book on Braxton) and many previously unseen photos by Nick White. It’s a fantastic set of thrilling, high-energy avant-garde jazz, and I couldn’t be more excited to be helping put it out into the world. A must-hear; get yourself one.

And here’s even more music: As part of the ongoing Leo Records digital reissue campaign, we’ve put out 20 more titles by Brazilian tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman. (Here’s a really good piece on the first 20, by James Koblin.)

Explore Ivo Perelman’s Leo Records catalog

This month’s releases are The Gift (with Matthew Shipp & Michael Bisio); Serendipity (with Shipp, William Parker & Gerald Cleaver); The Edge (with Shipp, Bisio & Whit Dickey); The Art Of The Duet (with Shipp); Enigma (with Shipp, Dickey & Cleaver); A Violent Dose Of Anything (with Shipp & Mat Maneri); Two Men Walking (with Maneri); The Other Edge (with Shipp, Bisio & Dickey); Book Of Sound (with Shipp & Parker); Reverie (with Karl Berger); Tenorhood (with Dickey); Callas (with Shipp); Counterpoint (with Maneri & Joe Morris); Butterfly Whispers (with Shipp & Dickey); Villa Lobos Suite (with Maneri & Tanya Kalmanovitch); Complementary Colors (with Shipp); The Hitchhiker (with Berger); Blue (with Morris); Soul (with Shipp, Bisio & Dickey); and Breaking Point (with Maneri, Morris & Cleaver).

All of these records are great in their own ways, but I want to focus in this newsletter on the three made with Shipp, Bisio and Dickey — The Edge, The Other Edge, and Soul.

That trio was Shipp’s working group for several years; they can be heard on his albums Elastic Aspects, Root Of Things, To Duke, and the second disc of the live The Art Of The Improviser. I saw them play in January 2011; it was an emotionally charged, ferociously energetic and frankly relentless hour of music.

With Perelman added to the mix, their work takes on an entirely different character. The music has more air in it, because everyone’s improvising freely. When he’s the one in charge, Shipp composes; his music has a heaviness that combines booming, liturgical chords with blues and delicate filigrees. But Perelman likes to start from zero, and while his playing often ends up in traditionally jazzy and even romantic places, he needs time to find his way there. So Shipp offers suggestions, and when the saxophonist heads down a promising path, the pianist follows him. Bisio and Dickey, meanwhile, are supportive voices, but never settle for mere accompaniment, even when they swing (and they do swing, at times).

What you’re really listening to/for most of the time in music this unfettered is Perelman’s tone, which is all his own. He mixes extreme upper-register squeals that go on for an extraordinarily long time, introspective murmurs, and deep, sometimes fuzzy explorations that recall the work of John Coltrane and Archie Shepp circa 1963-64, but also earlier players like Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster (there’s even a track on The Edge called “Websterisms”). Perelman is a reminder, for those who need one, that so-called “free jazz” is not a break with music from before 1965, but an extension of it, and that one must keep one foot in the past even as one strides forward.

These three albums were recorded over a span of several years — The Edge in June 2012, The Other Edge in January 2014, and Soul in July 2015 — but they feel very much of a piece, all part of a consistent body of work by four men who know each other’s minds and musical hearts inside and out. And taken together, they add up to almost three hours of inspired collective creation.

Explore Ivo Perelman’s Leo Records catalog

That’s it for this week, unless you’re a paying subscriber, in which case keep reading for articles and videos on Robert Crumb, Hiroshi Sugimoto, David Thomas, and Chandler Brossard. And next week, we’ll be talking about the late work of guitarist Robin Trower.